It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Although Halloween comes but once per year, the thirst for stories about vampires never seems to die. This has helped one UVic humanities professor, Peter Golz, to pursue his own passion for the study of these stories in film and literature for more than 20 years. In doing so, he’s made Victoria home to one of North America’s most popular university courses on vampires.
“The figure of the vampire allows students to delve into the desires and fears of particular cultures in particular historical moments,” says Humanities Associate Dean Academic Lisa Surridge. “Peter Golz has created a master class in cultural studies that has stood the test of time.”
More than a librarian of lore
For anyone who has spoken with Golz, it’s not surprising that his office is filled with an impressive range of vampire-related paraphernalia — action figures from popular TV shows like Twilight and Buffy: the Vampire Slayer; a vampire-themed magnetic poetry kit; a Dracula lunch box; a bottle of Dracula-branded wine (red, of course); a ‘little vampire pacifier,’ replete with blood-tipped fangs, still in its original packaging; along with film posters, DVDs and endless rows of books, books, books.
Even backed by this impressive cavern of keepsakes, the breadth and depth of Golz’ knowledge of vampire films, literature, culture and history is endlessly enthralling.
The briefest of conversations with this humble professor about his passion for the subject feels like an immersive symposium in vampirology. And no wonder: Golz has been teaching one of North America’s most popular courses on vampires for 20 years this fall.
When people ask me ‘what do you teach?’ and I say ‘vampire studies,’ they always reply with either ‘oh, that’s so cool!’ or ‘no, seriously, what do you teach?’
— Associate professor and vampirologist Peter Golz
A curriculum of vampires
The course Golz created for UVic’s Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies in 2001, which he’s taught every year since—A Cultural History of Vampires in Literature and Film—has captured the imagination of students, fans and the media alike over the last two decades.
It has been featured by a wide range of national and regional news outlets such as the Globe & Mail, CBC, Times Colonist and CHEK, and appears on countless ‘best course’ lists and vampire fan sites.
In 2014, Warner Brothers approached Golz about including a short clip on the course in the bonus materials of a special 20th anniversary edition BluRay release of the now-classic film Interview with the Vampire, but the deadline for filming was two weeks before the course started that year.
Attention like this, alongside glowing reviews from students, has helped course enrolment swell from 75 students in its first year to over 300 at its peak. When offered online for the first time last year as a result of the pandemic, the course attracted students from across Asia and Europe, as well as North and South America, despite the extreme time differences. Some passions never seem to sleep.
A vampire for every generation
In addition to the media attention and buzz generated on campus by word of mouth, Golz attributes the success of his course in part to the subject matter itself.
“Vampires have become a lot more interesting in the last 20 years, because they are not depicted as the stereotypical Other as they once were,” he says. In line with their famed shapeshifting powers, Vampires have learned to adapt—and fit in. “Now vampires are more likely to live among us, like in the TV series True Blood, the Twilight films or Buffy: the Vampire Slayer. And we are more likely to hear them tell their own story, like in Interview with the Vampire, which makes them more sympathetic characters.”
There is also an ever-growing diversity in the types of vampires, such as the child vampire of 1975’s Salem’s Lot, the ‘psychic vampire’ of Lifeforce and the ‘olfactory vampire’ of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.
The characteristics of our imagined vampires shift alongside our times and circumstances. For instance, there’s a growing demand for ‘pandemic vampires,’ Golz says, as seen in films like 2007’s I Am Legend and in TV series like The Strain.
Although this trend clearly speaks to our own time, the concept behind it has a long history. In the classic 1922 German Expressionist silent horror film, Nosferatu, death follows the vampire protagonist Count Orlok indiscriminately when he moves from Transylvania to Germany. The doctors in his town blame these deaths on an unspecified plague brought in by a swarm of rats that arrive with Orlok’s ship.
“Nosferatu was filmed in 1921, just after the Spanish flu epidemic,” Golz explains, “but it was set in the 1830s when there was a big cholera outbreak in Germany, rather than in its present day or in the late 1800s when the novel upon which it was based [Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula] was set. I think the film’s director wanted to make something that was really appropriate for its time, which is a concern we often see reflected in vampire storylines.”
This continual evolution of vampire mythology has helped to keep both vampire stories and Golz’ course content fresh over the decades.
A famous vampire scholar, Nina Auerbach, once said that there is a vampire for every generation, which I think is quite right. I also think there is a vampire for everyone, really. We have vampire westerns, vampire science-fiction, vampire romances, vampire parodies…. There is no shortage of vampire sub-genres for every audience.
— Golz
The future of the darkness seems bright
Given the course’s longevity and sustained popularity, it’s hard to believe that it took Golz eight long years to develop and get it approved by university administrators.
“Some of my colleagues were very much against this course, which is part of the reason I had to have “literature” in the course title — it had to have a literary component to give it credibility,” Golz recalls. “Now there are a lot of courses throughout Canada and the US that focus on vampires, zombies and other fantasy- and horror-based works. It has become a very popular topic with a very bright future.”
When asked about the brightest moments in his own career, Golz can list many: that time when Ballet Victoria invited him to introduce their new Dracula ballet and to bring his entire class to one of their performances, or the half-dozen presentations by leading vampire scholars that Golz has brought to UVic as part of the Lansdowne Lecture series, or the novel ideas of students who have sat in his classroom and shared with him their own passion for the shadowy underworld of the undead.
“This course is a lot of fun for me and I get to work with students who are really interested in the topic and do great work, so as long as I’m here I will continue to teach this course,” Golz states.
“But, I am obviously not a vampire, so it has to end at some point. But, maybe then it will be reborn. Who knows?”
Anne Rice’s Modern Vampire Is as Influential as Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Interview with the Vampire author Anne Rice’s passing leaves a hole in literature which may not be filled for generations.
Anne Rice and Bram Stoker, what other writers have done more to define vampire mythology and culture? Yes, there were stories before and more to come, but Interview with the Vampire, like Dracula before it, set the template for the classic and modern immortal nocturnal narrative.
Stoker’s Dracula was as much a feral creature as the historical figure from whom Stoker borrowed the name. Rice’s characters came from her imagination and had as much of the human essence in their psyches as the flesh between their fangs. They contemplated existential horrors, averted their eyes when loved ones died, and debated the ethics of nutritional hemoglobin, straight from the tap. They did it unblinkingly, and not only because of post-mortem ocular putrefaction.
Interview with the Vampire was originally a 38-page short story Rice wrote in late 1968 through early 1969. She extended it out of grief in 1972. Her five-year-old daughter, Michelle, died of acute granulocytic leukemia, a cancer which affects blood and bone marrow. Rice’s incredibly tortured personal reality is where modern vampire art was birthed. It is blood-borne. It is lethal. It begs so many questions, and mocks so many of the easy answers people offer to alleviate despair. It birthed an undead mythology and philosophy which reverberates to each generation. Louisiana, Transylvania – Native Soil or Bayou Mojo
Anne Rice was born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in 1941. Yes, Howard. She was named after her father by a Bohemian mother. When asked her name on the first day of kindergarten, she answered “Anne” and had it legally changed in 1947, according to the authorized biography Prism of the Night by Katherine Ramsland. Anne was 15 years old when she lost her mother to alcoholism, and her father placed her and her three sisters in a boarding school at the Gothic and foreboding St. Joseph’s Academy in Baton Rouge. Not as well known as Dracula’s castle, its shadows touch every nuanced rebellion Rice would quietly incite.
Louisiana is Anne Rice’s Transylvania, but she knew it far more intimately. Stoker researched his titular character’s origin in broad strokes. Rice was born in New Orleans and while she lived in quite a few different locations, including Texas and Hollywood, she always called New Orleans her home. Readers associate her with its Garden District, and her characters originate in wards. Louis de Pointe du Lac, the vampire who is interviewed in Interview with the Vampire, was a slave-holding plantation owner in antebellum New Orleans. He travels the world after escaping his vampire maker, Lestat de Lioncourt, journeying from the theaters of Paris to the saloons of San Francisco. But New Orleans is his spiritual home.
Because of Rice, Louisiana is now associated with the vampire. Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries, which was adapted into HBO’s influential series True Blood, took place in Bon Temps, Louisiana. The state has a long and chronicled history of vampire-like activity, both legendary and surprisingly real, and sad tales of wayward innocents. Remorseful Vampires
Rice’s vampires weren’t the first regretful bloodsuckers. In interviews, Anne herself cited Gloria Holden’s ambiguously carnal Countess Maria Zeleska in the 1936 Universal horror, Dracula’s Daughter, as an inspiration. Dark Shadows’ Barnabas Collins, played by Jonathan Frid, went as far as to bribe a friendly scientist to try and reverse the process which turned him into the undead. Even Count Dracula (John Carradine) went to Dr. Franz Edelmann (Onslow Stevens) for a cure to vampirism in House of Dracula (1945), as did biochemist Dr. Michael Morbius, who attempted it on himself in Marvel Comics’ Morbius. While none of them suffered biter’s regret like Lon Chaney Jr.’s werewolf in The Wolf Man, they fretted when they fed. Some were even prone to play sympathy games with their food.
“To die, to truly be dead, that must be glorious,” the Transylvanian count pondered in Dracula. The depths of his Eastern European philosophies laid cynically shallow. “Do you know what it means to be loved by Death,” Interview with the Vampire asked. “Do you know what it means to have Death know your name?”
Rice’s characters thrived on their immortality because it fed their hunger for meaning and tweaked their eternal curiosity. They could ponder the fates of mankind and beyond, measure death by the gallon, sin by the moment, and still procure dinner for two before the sun rose. Rice’s vampires were animals, beasts even, but they were thinking beasts. She taught even the most over-thinking vampires to explore the possibilities, with an eye towards ever-elusive karmic retribution, and go for the jugular.
“What we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret,” we read, and Rice concisely sets out, for the first time with such eloquent clarity, the choice that lies beyond the veil. It is more than hunter and prey, and yet as simple an equation. “God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we.”
We’re a Happy Family
Morality and immortality make for strange bedfellows. What is acceptable today got you burned at the stake centuries ago. The attitudes of a few years’ past can cancel your present, and Rice forever straddled attitudes yet to come. It has been said the character Claudia is based on Rice’s daughter Michelle, which explains the lingering pain of losing that character. But Rice twists this agonizing scenario until it redefines the nuclear dysfunctional family itself on a vampire’s terms. Lestat, Louis, and Claudia stay together for 65 years in Interview with the Vampire. Normal parents would have been throwing hints sometime around graduation.
Did Lestat make Claudia to save his relationship with Louis? Is this like having a child to save a marriage? What is fair about a mentally cognizant teenager, and then adult, stuck in a six-year-old’s body? Claudia is not acceptable in the world of the vampires, and inexplicably twisted in the world of the breathing. Is the relationship paternal? Incestuous? Rice took the time to pose new questions, expanding the emotional vocabulary of vampire fiction, but also of the horror genre and the audience at home. This continues as characters within all genre works, page or screen, now routinely dig at the deeper questions. They’re not afraid anymore. Rice did it without really scaring us. Fluid Sexuality
Rice’s vampires live in a world of decadence and carnality. Age has taught them pleasure lies in diversity and expansion. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf bought the novel in 1974, paying Rice an advance of $12,000. Interview with the Vampire hit bookstore shelves on May 5, 1976.
Critics attacked its dark themes and overt eroticism. Some say Rice romanticized the vampire beyond its sinister limits. Her vampires are sexy, beautiful, self-determining creatures with the power to traverse heaven, hell, and time, as they would go on to do in Memnoch the Devil. Rice freed them from the petty morality of traditional social repression, and the limiting sensual expression of popular genre release.
Vampire lesbianism had always been projected through the male gaze. Ingrid Pitt in The Vampire Lovers (1971)–based on Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 seminal vampire work Carmella, or Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger, broke ground for sexual expression. But both films were made because it was a turn on for the director, producer, and/or mass audience.
Rice’s erogenous fluidity is a vampiric reality. What does anything matter if it truly all turns out to be exactly the same? There are no gender assignments in androgynous prose, no term limits on sexually active verbs. Male and female characters are defined through ability, survival, and adaptability. Vampiric mentorship also has no assignments. “Let the flesh instruct the mind,” Rice wrote Mentors and Reluctant Students
Lestat turns and instructs Louis on his new existence, which is more than the older European vampire got when he was initially turned. This is the core of the most influential dynamic Rice brings to modern vampire fiction. Louis sees his supernatural impulses as unnatural while Lestat has lived long enough to know it’s the most natural thing in the universe. It is the natural order.
For motion pictures and television, the first and most prevalent takeaway from this was the importance of contrasting hair color. In The Lost Boys (1987), sun-bleached hemoglobin-sucker David (Kiefer Sutherland) shares takeout with the new Jim Morrison-wannabe-lookalike in town, Michael (Jason Patric), a very reluctant nibbler. While this could have easily moved into the openly sexual spectrum Rice found so easy to lay out, the two male vampire characters have Star (Jami Gertz), a female character, to assure the audience of their heteronormativity.
It is the same function Buffy Summers plays between Angel (David Boreanaz) and Spike (James Marsters) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) convinced Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) and Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgård) to indulge in their mutual lust for her in True Blood. By the time The Vampire Diaries hit the CW, Stefan (Paul Wesley) and Damon Salvatore (Ian Somerhalder) were vampire brothers, and all homoerotic tension was annulled.
Vampire literature has not stayed so static. There have been blockbuster films made out of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, and underground masterpieces like the many works of Poppy Z. Brite, the professional name of Billy Martin. All of which owe something to the author who invented Lestat.
Rice caught a genre in flux and a culture in need. Her influence extends to the clubs and underground gatherings of the vampire community, where the decadence of the novels can be experienced in a natural setting: with music and dancing, something Rice liberally sprinkled onto her pages.
Rice’s output, of course, expands beyond the vampires who appeared in Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, and other books of the Vampire Chronicles series. She also wrote about witches, in The Witching Hour, which began the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy. Her ghost story, Violin, came out in 1997. She wrote historical novels, like The Feast of All Saints, and Cry to Heaven. Under pen names, the former Howard O’Brien published erotic novels, such as The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, Beauty’s Release, Belinda, and Exit to Eden, which was adapted into a film.
“Evil is always possible,” Rice wrote in Interview with The Vampire. “And goodness is eternally difficult.” Her later books struggled with this idea as they eventually took a more difficult path. She chronicled the life of Jesus in the trilogy of books Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, and Christ the Lord: Kingdom of Heaven, and wrote the first two books in her Songs of the Seraphim series: Angel Time and Of Love and Evil. It is all too clear Rice moved on from the vampire literature she altered, but her influence will continue to bring reminders. For the Blood is the Life. Rice brought art to bot
Written by Tony Sokol | @tsokol Culture Editor Tony Sokol is a writer, playwright and musician. He contributed to Altvariety, Chiseler, Smashpipe, and other magazines. He is the TV Editor at Entertainment…
Can Vampires Be Jewish? A quick and cursory look at an age-old hypothetical. Anastasia Fein, Tzion Baruch and Amos Tamam in “Juda” (Promotional still: Hulu)
I’m a big fan of hypothetical questions that spark debate within the Jewish community, and with the concept of vampires constantly floating (or hovering) in the back of my mind, I’ve found myself diving into the question of whether or not a creature of the night can be Jewish.
This topic has been debated hotly by generations of Jews, and its implications are explored in the Israeli television show “Juda,” where religion and vampirism meet. The consensus, as far as I can tell, is that due to their thirst for blood (human or otherwise), a vampire could not keep kosher. A counter argument to this is that a vampire would need to drink blood to stay alive, but then the question arises: Is a vampire life really a life? Can a vampire have a soul? And so forth.
Of course, the antisemitic implications of a Jewish vampire usually stop this debate (un)dead in its tracks. An incredibly flimsy but prolific excuse for violence toward Jewish people is accusations of blood libel, where Jews were accused of drinking the blood of Christian children. To what end? Your guess is as good as mine, since I’d personally prefer some water or a nice iced coffee. But the point still stands: to represent a Jewish person in media as a vampire carries some pretty weighty implications.
Miriam AnzovinIn “Juda,” making a Jewish person a vampire is considered a huge faux pas, not because of the guilt saddling someone with that kind of raw deal may instill, but because Jewish vampires become super powerful. I like to imagine, however, that if vampires were real, they would instill a moratorium on turning Jewish people because, truly, have we not suffered enough? This also brings into question the act of turning and whether it is voluntary. For argument’s sake, I’ll operate under loose “Interview with the Vampire” rules, which can also be found in what I believe is the best piece of modern vampire media: “What We Do in the Shadows” (both the film and the TV series, created by Jewish luminary Taika Waititi). In both depictions, turning someone into a vampire is voluntary, so a vampire choosing to turn a Jewish victim would be a major party foul, especially without their consent.
Now that we have our unfortunate Jewish vampire, the question remains: Could she continue to practice Judaism? Vampires cannot cross onto holy ground, though this often refers to Christian-specific ground, so entering a synagogue would be a bit difficult. In “Interview with the Vampire,” Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise are both able to say “God,” so praying privately may be an option. Vampires also can’t cross running water, and immersion in a mikvah relies heavily on living water. If our hypothetical vampire was Jewish before her turning, she may find many vital Jewish practices difficult due to her new rules.
On a more somber note, I’m also interested in how a Jewish vampire would mourn. Would she say Kaddish for herself or mark her own yahrzeit? What about for other vampires or Jewish people in her life? I’m inclined to lean toward a modified version, since a Jewish person is still Jewish even in death. These are all, of course, very silly questions, but questions are the backbone of faith. Though I can’t definitively say whether a vampire could be Jewish, the not-knowing is part of the fun, and fuel for many conversations among many, many Jews.
Arts & Culture Corinne Engber is an Ohio native and recently completed her MA in publishing and writing at Emerson College.
Her son, author Christopher Rice, spoke to As It Happens host Carol Off, about his mother's writing and the deeper meaning behind it. Here is part of their conversation.
She really defies categorization, doesn't she, as a writer? I mean, they say she's the vampire writer, the gothic stories writer. But you must be getting so many people responding to her work and her passing with their own views on what she contributed to their lives.
I like to say she was a one-woman army against mediocrity and convention.
The people who are reaching out to me, and the public outpourings of grief — all of which have made this easier for the family because most of it is so loving and respectful — [say] that she articulated this way of being different in the world.
My best friend, [writer] Eric Shaw Quinn, who was also a very close friend of hers, said she brought an answer to this question that was particularly resonant to queer people, of: How can I be in this world and not be a thing of God?
That was what she used the vampire for. But it's also what she used witches for. And then later it was what she used werewolves for. She used paranormal, supernatural gothic tales to pursue what she saw as these great cosmic spiritual questions.
And in the long arc of the Vampire Chronicles novels, we see the vampires coming to that understanding. And there is a moment in Prince Lestat, which was her return to the series, where she has the character, Louis, who begins Interview With The Vampire in total dread and alienation and despair over both the grief of having lost his brother and then the horror of being turned into a vampire creature that must take life to live. By the time he arrives at Prince Lestat, where he has a moment in the garden of this home where other vampires are gathered, where he realizes: I belong. If I was created, I belong.
I think that is why her work transcends for so many people.
Anne was about defiance. She was about defying the things that could hold us back and hold us down- Christopher Rice, author, son of Anne Rice
I was reading the obituary in the New York Times, and they go back to one of their own earliest reviews of your mother's work. They say [it's] ... "self-conscious soliloquizing out of Spider-Man comics wrapped in pompous language." … And yet, almost immediately, Interview With The Vampire and the Vampire Chronicles became bestsellers, right? They just defied the critics, didn't they, these works?
She always saw herself starkly at odds with whatever the literary trends of the moment were.
The accomplishment of Interview with the Vampire that I think we all see now, which was not seen in the moment by many critics, was that she had completely flipped the point of view. She had taken what was previously considered to be … the unknowable monster, and she went into their point of view and she showed us: What does the world look like through the eyes and the heart of the character we have dismissed in these terms?
There were so many people who identified with that shift, you know, not the least of which was her.
Rice, left, and her son Christopher Rice, right, who followed in her footsteps and became an author. (Submitted by Christopher Rice)
Fierce. She was a fierce mother. She was a fierce advocate for me. But she was also a fierce advocate for what she saw as my artistic potential.
As a young child, I was in this almost Montessori-style school with no letter grades. We would sit in circles every morning and the students would share their feelings. It was so California through and through. But they brought her in once because she had allowed me to watch the movie Jaws as a young boy and I had become sort of both terrified and obsessed with its imagery the way young children do.
And I was drawing these photographs and the teacher showed her the pictures and they said: "Look at the fear in these photographs."
And she said: "Look at the talent."
There was not an attempt to lock me away in a bubble or to keep the world sanitized for me. I was treated like an adult. I was conversed with like an adult fairly early on. I think one of the kind of milestone moments for us was that I discovered by accident in that same school that [my parents] had had a child before me.
We were making family trees. It was a sort of school project and using construction paper and cutting out, you know, squares for different relatives. And this student in class … made a joke about what we did for a relative who had died. Did we use a dead apple? Did we draw one on our tree?
And the teacher scolded him and said, "We're not going to talk about it that way. Many people in this class have had relatives who died, including Chris, who had a sister."
I was stunned. And I remember I looked up at the teacher and I said — very prim and proper, as was my way back then — "I most certainly did not."
The teacher's face fell, and my father came to pick me up from school later that day, and she took him aside and told him what had happened. And from then on, they opened up this aspect of their lives to me that yes, they had had this other child, she had become gravely ill. The drawings on the walls that they had said were from a neighbour in an old neighbourhood were actually by her. And they didn't hold back. And they let me ask questions about who she was and who she had been and how she had died.
Anne Rice, pictured here with a black bob and gothic choker, used the paranormal as a tool for exploring questions of identity and belonging, says her son. (Reuters)
The celebration of her life will be open to the public. I expect there are going to be a lot of fans there. She has said in the past that when she would go to signings, there would be all kinds of people there with dead roses, wrapped in leather, handcuffs and lace and velvet. But do you expect just an extraordinary array of people who will want to celebrate her with you?
I certainly hope so, and I think we're going to build something that welcomes them and invites them because I think the thing that's important to remember about all of those wild theatrical book signings is that they were a lot of fun. You know, there was a sense that we weren't mocking death, but we were embracing the gothic in a way that was loving and about the splendour of it.
Anne was about defiance. She was about defying the things that could hold us back and hold us down. And we're going to build an event that celebrates that.
Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview produced by Abby Plener. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Anne Rice, New Orleans native and author
of gothic novels, dead at 80
BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DEC 12, 2021 Author Anne Rice's archives will be housed at Tulane University in her hometown, New Orleans.PROVIDED PHOTO
Anne Rice, the gothic novelist widely known for her bestselling novel "Interview With the Vampire," died late Saturday at the age of 80.
Rice died due to complications from a stroke, her son Christopher Rice announced on her Facebook page and his Twitter page.
"In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage," Christopher Rice wrote in the statement.
Anne Rice was the author of the 1976 novel "Interview With the Vampire," which was later adapted, with a script by Rice, into the 1994 movie directed by Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. It's also set to be adapted again in an upcoming TV series on AMC and AMC+ set to premiere next year. Archive of fantasy writer, New Orleans native Anne Rice to be permanently housed at Tulane
"Interview With the Vampire," in which reporter Daniel Molloy interviews Louis de Pointe du Lac, was Rice's first novel but over the next five decades, she would write more than 30 books and sell more than 150 million copies worldwide. Thirteen of them were part of the "Vampire Chronicles" begun with her 1976 debut.
Born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien in 1941, she was raised in New Orleans, where many of her novels were set. Her father worked for the postal service but made sculptures and wrote fiction on the side. Her older sister, Alice Borchardt, also wrote fantasy and horror fiction. Rice's mother died when Rice was 15.
Raised in an Irish Catholic family, Rice wrote about her fluctuating spiritual journey, including the 2008 memoir "Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession." But in 2010, she announced that she was no longer Christian, saying "I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control." "I believed for a long time that the differences, the quarrels among Christians didn't matter a lot for the individual, that you live your life and stay out of it. But then I began to realize that it wasn't an easy thing to do," Rice told The Associated Press then. "I came to the conclusion that if I didn't make this declaration, I was going to lose my mind."
Rice was expected to be interred during a private ceremony at a family mausoleum in New Orleans on an undisclosed date, according to the statement. A public celebration of life was to take place next year.
THE UNDYING APPEAL OF ANNE RICE
Her vampires are born again into power and
alienation
Joe Scarnici/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images RANDY POTTS NIGHT CREATURES 12.14.2021
There was a summer in 2009 when a brand new boyfriend found a brand new habit smoking meth and I, to deal with something you can’t really deal with, buried my head in Anne Rice’s vampire books. It was hot that summer in Dallas and his place was small and stuffy; I’d lie on his bed naked, propped up on my elbows reading, fully engrossed in Rice’s novels until he’d eventually come back, always sweating too. Sweating but not from the heat or, at least, not just from that; he’d lean down and kiss me, grinning, with a mouth that looked like devils pouring out: lips flared; teeth, somehow, sharper; a grin meant to prove to me everything was normal.
I suppose there was, in truth, only one summer in 2009 but it felt like so many different summers that year. I was convinced for a time that my boyfriend would die, an addict, maybe in an alley somewhere, maybe with a tourniquet, tied up, a sleeve torn off? Fantasy. Vampire fantasy, specifically — The Vampire Lestat, then Interview With A Vampire, The Vampire Armand, Memnoch the Devil — weekly trips to the nearest Barnes and Noble to get my fix. Vampires are addicted, too, but in Anne Rice’s vampire world they’re not just addicted to blood. Power, knowledge, understanding — maybe even love — and youth, and moonlight, and shadows, and the smell of flowers rotting in New Orleans spilling out into the streets like blood.
Even if at one point Rice does pull a C.S. Lewis and try to quasi-scientifically explain the power of the blood — “there is power, power, wonder working power in the precious blood of the lamb”— Rice’s books are not sci-fi, they are fantasy. The easiest read of them is that Anne Rice’s vampire chronicles are just another Boomer trying to deal with aging. Trying to find a certain power in the chill settling on suddenly brittle, bloodless, always cold hands — vampires warming their hands on hot drinks is a big thing in those books — but, of course, it’s not that simple. I remember my boyfriend warming his hands on me, too, in the air conditioning, while he sweated. Blood pressure. Up, down. Up.
Lestat is everybody’s favorite vampire among Anne Rice adepts and for good reason; the best pages Rice ever wrote include the opening of Lestat’s story in The Vampire Lestat when a wiry, muscled, fantastically-blonde 20-year-old brat born to a house of nobles in decline, astride a horse in the wintry French wilds, battles wolves with two rusted guns, a mace, and two soon-to-be-dead dogs. And yet, my favorite character, by far, is Marius — bookish, Roman, dutiful Marius.
I loved Lestat the same way I loved my boyfriend: desperately. Stupidly. Worshipfully. Lestat was glinting metal and anger and a raw, quick bleed; you could dance with him but it wouldn’t last. In the end it was every man for himself: it was blood in his eyes and on his teeth and that one time when I literally carried him home from the bar and he collapsed on the floor next to the bed and was suddenly somehow too heavy to lift. I left him there all night and, in the morning, teeth bared, he asked me why I didn’t fuck him. Like that. Prone, on the floor, that night, ass up in the air. Drugs make you want funny things. Funny, scary, dark things.
Marius and Lestat are two sides of the same coin; the same character, really, a father/son duo at times, united by their worship of Those Who Must Be Kept. Lestat’s search for Marius across the ravages of time — etching words in stone in the empty forgotten wheat and farro fields of antiquity — is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read. It’s a search for Jesus, a will to know: why was Lestat, and all other vampires, forsaken? Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani — my god, why hast thou forsaken me — was the cry they heard from Jesus on the cross and it was Lestat’s cry, too.
And mine, that summer, already disowned by family and church and suddenly watching my boyfriend’s smile become sharper the way vampires do.
Eli eli; lama sabachthani.
What Rice’s vampire books are about, maybe, is people being against their will taken from their place within the human condition and thrust into: the void. Into a new body, a new being, one that only has a parasitic relationship with the past; many Christians and gays can relate. Gays, converts to a new faith, meth smokers — they’ve all been born again. All of us have, in one way or another, and that rebirth, even when it’s something we chose —can you choose alienation? — that rebirth is never easy. Rice’s vampire novels have all the sex and drama and beauty and queer romance you could want but they mostly have a champion (me, you) and a reality — being alone, cut off from your past, the rest of your life having to settle for savoring things that will always feel unfamiliar and often, especially for certain vampires, not just deadly but plain wrong.
How the fuck do you deal with that? As a born again anything you gain new powers but you are also saddled with strict, unbending restrictions; in Rice’s world many vampires, eventually, choose to go into the fire to escape the thrust-upon-them terribly-unfair beautifully-powerful condition of: being reborn. Being a vampire. Being both hunter and prey, sleeping only in fortresses or hidden redoubts beneath the earth. Coming out in the evening when the stars twinkle and the gay bars boom and the lighters’ soft firelight flickers on reflective black leather harnesses. Smoke, and mirrors, and cold bloodless hands wrapped around a mug of hot steaming… something.
I refused to let my boyfriend go until I had to let him go; he survived, and I did too; Rice’s books, with me til the day we parted ways. I learned, years later, that most people don’t actually die from meth; even so most people are, if they smoke it long enough, born again. It’s a hard life, that new life, just a baby all over again, defenseless, unable to work, unable to pay the bills, unable to even, eventually, kiss your boyfriend. Nothing but hot, pulsing blood on the mind, no longer the warm and tender body, the beloved reduced to the taste of salt and iron and your victim, wincing, swooning, the life rushing out— that vampire life. Sexy, cool, empty — and filled with fire.
Randy Potts is a public school teacher in Washington, D.C.
The world lost a literary giant this past weekend. Anne Rice, author of nearly 40 novels, including the transformative Vampire Chronicles series, passed away at age 80. Many, including myself, have elaborated upon how much Rice’s novels transformed vampire fiction. And gothic fiction overall. But personally, Anne Rice changed my life. Particularly as a queer person who barely saw himself represented in the kinds of fantastical fictional landscapes that I loved. I know I was hardly alone in this regard.
Alfred A. Knopf
Rice’s first three vampire novels came out between 1976 and 1988. But it was in the early ‘90s that the books, now packaged as a trilogy, really took off with readers. (Similar to how the ‘50s published The Lord of the Rings became a ’60 counterculture phenomenon). Rice’s The Vampires Chronicles and Lives of the Mayfair Witches books drew queer Gen X readers like me en masse into her hyper-sensualized world. But really, anyone who felt like they didn’t belong in a world that celebrated the ordinary and mundane over the exotic and transgressive found kinship with Rice’s beautiful monsters too.
I first heard of Anne Rice’s world in hushed tones. I was perhaps eight years old—this was the early ‘80s. A paperback novel my aunt and older brother both read, Interview with the Vampire, captivated them. I was curious as to what they were talking about all the time, so they tried to explain the book to me in kid terms. They explained to me that it was about “a family of Draculas.” One a little girl, who lived forever and could never grow up. The novel had an image of the three leads on the back. And it was a hilariously bad photo. One that didn’t resemble their descriptions in the book at all. But I was fascinated with this grown-up book I couldn’t read. The memory of that novel’s cover imagery stuck with me.
Fast forward several years. By 1989, that lone vampire book had become a trilogy. The Vampire Chronicles, which comprised Interview, The Vampire Lestat, and the Queen of the Damned. Now a teenager, I was old enough to read and truly appreciate these books, and I utterly devoured them. I loved the tale of the vampiric family of the first novel—particularly the tragedy of the undead child Claudia. Anne Rice created a lush and sensuous world I had never experienced, and I finished that first book only wanting more.
Ballantine Books
But the two immediate follow-up novels expanded upon the universe and its history in ways that rendered that first novel almost quaint. The way Rice explored vampiric history, going back to the days of ancient Rome and ancient Egypt, enthralled me. She had taken this vampire legend exploited in pop culture for years, and created an entirely new mythology for it. Other vampire fiction has made their own vampire origin stories since then, but I’ve yet to see one that matches anything that Rice invented.
But the real way Rice’s books changed my life was the fact that my discovering them coincided with my own coming to terms with being gay. The late ‘80s and early ‘90s were not an era when mainstream genre fiction explored queer themes. Certainly not the kind of fiction that sold millions of copies. Even a 14-year-old me understood that these characters, despite not having sex the way humans do, were explicitly queer. The vampire Lestat loved his progeny Louis romantically, as much as he loved his human lover Nicolas before him. Yes, women also drew him in, like Akasha, a vampire queen. But his principal relationships were with other men. In fact, the family of Lestat, Louis, and their daughter Claudia were the first same-sex parents I ever encountered in any media.
Warner Bros.
And with that queer subtext explicit, it shaped how I viewed my sexuality at a vulnerable age. Interview with the Vampire in particular showed the main character of Louis as someone who hated what he was, and despised all of his own innate desires. No matter how much pleasure and companionship it gave him over the centuries. He was the perfect metaphor for the self-loathing homosexual, who begins and ends the narrative as someone who despises his very nature. So, not the role model I wanted.
His vampiric maker, Lestat, was the opposite. Yes, he was essentially the villain of that first book, and took despicably cruel actions at times. But he also believed that their outsider nature gave them a unique perspective on humanity that no one else had. It wasn’t a curse, as Louis saw it, but a gift. One with serious drawbacks, to be sure, what with the “having to kill” thing and all. But a gift nevertheless. Absorbing these books, I felt a lightbulb go off over my head. “What makes you different makes you special, not lesser.” It’s a lesson I internalized, and I have Anne Rice to thank for it.
I could have chosen to hate myself for what I was by nature, much like Louis did. A great deal of LGBTQ folks in my generation absolutely struggled with this. Or, I could relish in my otherness. I chose to view my circumstances as Lestat did his. In The Vampire Lestat, he said “I am very good at being what I am.” Well then, I would be too. As I met more and more Rice fans, I noticed how many of the most devoted were queer like me. Or, at the very least, didn’t fit into society the way everyone else did. Her Sleeping Beauty series of erotica put BDSM literature in the local chain bookstore. She did so decades before there were 50 shades of anything. And the BDSM community embraced her as well.
But like all things initially loved by queer and outsider audiences, mainstream consumers eventually wanted in on the phenomenon. I’ll always remember the moment when I was browsing in a bookstore circa 1991. I was all of 16 years old. I overheard a customer talking to a clerk, asking her all these questions about a nameless character in a book. And I quickly realized that she was asking about Louis, the narrator of Interview. As an impertinent kid, I butted into the conversation. “Louis clearly struggles with depression,” I said. She replied, “Has EVERYONE read all these books except me?”
For a time, it sure felt like everyone had.
Alfred A. Knopf
By the time Rice’s fourth Vampire Chronicle, The Tale of the Body Thief, came out in 1992, Rice was like a nerdy rock star to her most devoted fans. I recall a book signing in a Barnes & Noble at a mall. My teenage friends and I got there early, hoping to be among the first to meet our literary idol. We didn’t account for the fans who camped out overnight. We were in line for the better part of eight hours. But we didn’t mind. We bonded in line with other fans. We talked about how which characters were our favorites, and how wonderfully queer it all was. And, of course, who we’d like to see play them in an eventual movie. And trust me, Tom Cruise was never on our radar. Even though Rice herself admitted that worked out.
Her characters seemed real to us, because they were real to her. She’d often elaborate about how she’d look at the world around her and wonder what Lestat or others would think of something she’d read or experienced. She used real-world locations in her novels, to the point where the entirety of her Witching Hour book took place in her own Garden District mansion in New Orleans. This trend goes back to the beginning. The house where Louis gives his confession in Interview with the Vampire is a real Victorian house in San Francisco, one which still stands. On the day after Rice passed, I had to go and make a pilgrimage to the place where it all began to pay my respects.
Nerdist
Another thing about Anne Rice that made her special was that she was one of us. And by that I mean she was a huge nerd too. In the ’90s, she had a publicly listed phone number fans could call to hear her talk and answer questions about her novels, or just hear her effusively recommend current films and books. (My phone bill, thanks to all those calls to New Orleans, was a hefty one). In the modern era, her Facebook page mainly featured her talking about all the same media we all love, from Game of Thrones to True Blood to Downton Abbey.
Anne Rice understood fiction had a transformative power, especially fantasy fiction. It’s part of the reason why she was so grateful for her readers. Because she loved fiction in the exact same way we did. She never thought our passion for stories of the fantastic was frivolous or a waste of time. She was honored that people loved her stories the way she loved those of Charles Dickens and others. Looking at it now, in her final years, her returning to her world of vampires, mummies, and pansexual erotica, felt like a beautiful farewell gift to us.
So I want to say now, to Anne Rice, wherever you are: as a boy you helped me see my queerness as a blessing, and I am forever grateful. As an adult professional who interviewed you more than once, you were thoughtful and generous with your time. Your work will live on in me, and millions of your readers who identified with your glamourous outsiders. You once said, “I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning… rather than one great dull answer to all our questions.” I hope you are wandering the halls of this library now, soaking in all that beautiful knowledge.
